New Forms of Work

ARL’s Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication report details a number of new forms of scholarly work we will want to include in any discussion of the future of research. The report offers several tangible examples of creative uses of digital technologies to expand and enhance the impact of artifacts of scholarly processes– my favorite among them is JOVE— the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which documents, in “video articles” the practical and methodological practices of researchers in biology, neuroscience, and medicine. The additional instructional value of this genre of multimedia cannot be ignored.

What is interesting to me about each of these examples is how the majority of them situate the social interaction of the scholarly communication process alongside the research “products”… Interesting too, how these interactions can serve to build the types of reputations that the traditional peer-review process has long created. One wonders about, specifically in the case of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (which used print supplements to legitimize itself in the eyes of those with a bias against digital publications), the degree to which print publications are given a pass due only to their format.